Cultural burning and the return of cool fire

Cool fire has become a phrase that travels faster than the people who know what it means. It appears in documentaries and in the hopeful closing paragraph of articles about Black Summer. A low flame, moving slowly through grass on a still morning, is a better image than a night ridge going up like a fuse. The danger is that the image gets detached from authority, from law, and from the particularity that makes the practice work.

This journal is not an Aboriginal fire authority. It cannot confer permission and it will not offer a Saturday method. It can say what cool fire is and is not, and why copying a video is a way to meet a fire investigator.

Not a technique you can lift

Cultural burning is a practice held by Aboriginal people. It is knowledge bound to Country — to a forest that is not the next forest, to a season that is not a calendar month, to species that have names in a language the planning overlay does not print. Some of that knowledge was interrupted by dispossession and by the long period in which unauthorised fire was treated only as a crime. Some of it was kept. The present generation of practitioners — rangers, Firesticks networks, family groups walking with agencies — are a continuation re-entering a legal landscape built for engines.

Respect, in this context, is not a tone of voice. It is a set of behaviours. You do not name yourself a cultural burner because you have read a book. You do not film someone else's burn and treat the footage as a recipe. If you want fire used well, you begin with relationships that may take years, and with the ordinary permissions: the rural fire service, the local lighting-up laws, the neighbours who will smell smoke and call it in.

The civic habit of showing up and not grabbing the steering wheel is described in how Landcare actually works. It applies here with extra care. Fire is not a working bee with a higher production value.

What cool fire is

Cool fire, as the phrase is now used in south-eastern practice, is fire of low intensity, put on at a time when the fuel will take a flame and not a race. It often moves through grass and leaf litter. It leaves the canopy. It creates a mosaic: this patch burned, that patch left, a later patch to be done when the first has done its job. Animals can move. Bark remains on the tree. The soil is not cooked into a hydrophobic crust. The point, on Country, is seldom only “fuel reduction”. It may be to clean a path, protect a scarred tree, bring on a food plant, or keep a rainforest edge from becoming an entry point in drought.

The flame is small enough to walk with. That means a real weather window, enough trained people to hold an edge, and knowing when to go home because the day has turned. Where this has been allowed at a useful scale — the north has a longer unbroken practice; parts of the south are rebuilding — the results are ones fire science already understood: less continuous litter, more patchiness, a different understorey than the one that follows a hot inferno. After a season like the one in bushfire ecology after Black Summer, that difference is not a boutique interest.

What it is not

It is not a guarantee. Cool fire will not make a landscape fireproof. No fire practice will. A bad day — the day of low humidity, strong wind, and fuel that has cured beyond manners — will still be a bad day. Anyone who sells cultural burning as an insurance policy against Black Summer is not doing the practitioners a favour.

It is not automatically gentle on every plant. Some weeds enjoy a low fire. Some native shrubs are thinned by repeated burning in ways a particular Country may want and a neighbouring Country may not. Fire is a tool that can write a grassland into a forest edge, or a forest edge into a weedscape, depending on what is already in the seedbank. The companion problem of plants that take over after disturbance is laid out in weeds that rewrite Australian bushland. A burn that is culturally right can still need a weeding year. Pretending otherwise is how a good practice gets blamed for a garden escape.

It is not the same operation as an agency hazard-reduction burn, even when an agency and a group of practitioners share a morning. Hazard reduction, as it has been practised, is often a large block, a hotter prescription, an aircraft, a window snatched between weather and politics, a metric in hectares. It has saved houses. It has also scorched gullies that did not need it and missed the fine, frequent work that would have been more use. The two can learn from each other. They should not be collapsed into one press release. A non-Indigenous landholder lighting a grass edge in a respectful hat has not become a cultural burner. They may be doing a legal fuel-reduction job. That can be honourable. It should be named accurately.

Liability, training and the paperwork that follows flame

Fire escapes. That is the sentence insurers, councils and rural fire services have to live with. Cultural practitioners working with agencies now spend a great deal of time inside the same paperwork that attends any planned burn: notifications, weather sign-off, traffic, a radio, an after-action note. This is tedious and it is how you keep a practice alive in a country that litigates. Anyone who tells you that cultural fire is above the law is not a friend of the practice. Anyone who uses the law as a blanket ban on Aboriginal people putting fire on their own Country is not a friend of the country.

Training is not a weekend badge. A landholder's useful course is the one their fire service already offers, plus the humility to know when a forested gully is outside that competence. If you manage public land, the work is to make room — contracts, insurance, genuine decision-making — not to add a ceremonial flame to a burn designed in an office. If you manage a private block, ask who speaks for that Country, and accept that the answer may be “not you, and not this year”.

When not to copy a video

Do not light a fire because a reel made it look like walking meditation. You do not know the fuel moisture. You do not know the hollow log that will hold a coal until midnight. You do not know the neighbour's uninsured fence. You do not know the cultural prohibition on that hillside. The camera had a weather window and an editor. You have a Tuesday and a south-westerly that was not in the caption.

Do not burn peat, organic soils, or a drying wetland because someone said fire is healing. Some ground fires do not go out when you want them to. Do not burn in a total fire ban, or in the shoulder of a ban, because you have decided the phrase “cool fire” is a legal theory. It is not. Do not take fire into a rainforest remnant, a slope above a town, or a weedy gully full of lantana without people who have met those conditions before. The internet is full of fire that was safe in its context. Context is the entire skill.

Walking beside, not ahead

The return of cool fire to parts of southern Australia is one of the better stories available in a heating climate, and a fragile one. It can be killed by romanticism, by bureaucracy, or by a single badly copied burn.

A reader's job is mostly restraint and usefulness. Support the groups that already exist, if they ask for support. Show up to the unglamorous notifications. Keep weeds down so that a good fire is not asked to solve a garden dump. Read the ecology of a hard season without demanding that cool fire erase it. The rest of Fire Season is heat, houses, and the long summer; this essay asks you to leave the matches to the people who are allowed to carry them. A small flame, on the right morning, looked after by the right people, is attention. Attention is not transferable by link.